15. Happy Birthday?

Ten years ago today I became a father.

We all know the normal platitudes that are supposed to flow following a statement like that. This is the time when, traditionally, I should be banging on about how much I love my daughter, about how proud I was, about the joy that babies bring and how that little bundle of innocence made my life complete.

But it wasn’t like that at all.

”That grass definitely looks greener to me…”

I was scared. I simply wasn’t ready for parenthood, I was barely prepared for adulthood and yet here was I, being presented with the responsibility of bringing a new person into the world. I literally felt, holding my daughter for the first time, as though I’d been kicked in the stomach. Compared to this bombshell, the entire output of Capcom’s survival-horror department is shown to be the fluffy fairy tales that they really are.

So, I’m sitting there, over the next few days surrounded by the gleaming smiles of fresh grandparents, doting aunts and the inquisitive prods of various progeny and everyone is saying the same thing. A constant chorus of “Isn’t she lovely? You must be so proud…” until my head is spinning and all I can think of to say is that yes, I am proud, thank you. The more blasé I am with my response, the less sincere I try and be, the more it is accepted as the inalienable truth.

A great French philosopher once wrote:
”Hell is other people’s kids”.

I nodded and smiled as the increasingly distant relatives came and went, I went back to work and endured the seemingly endless jokes about nappies and breast-feeding from male colleagues and another round of inane questions from the female ones and, pretty much, carried on my life as before – with added baby. The thing about babies is that all of the things that you expect to be hard (nappies, bathing, feeding and whatnot) are actually piss-easy. You just feed them at one end and keep the other as clean as possible. Nothing to it – you soon settle into a routine.

Conversely though, all the things that you expect to be easy are hard – almost impossibly so. All the standard literature on parenthood, babies and the nurturing thereof leads you to expect to fall instantly and totally in love with your first-born. I’m sure that, for some people, this is completely true but, when I looked upon my daughter’s sleeping face, all I could feel was relief that she didn’t need looking after for a couple of hours. Everything else was empty.

Well, at least it’s obvious what it is. Nice cosh, too.

I was, in short, floundering. I was powerless in the face of this responsibility. I was lost, alone and frightened in a world I didn’t understand.

And when we’re alone, and scared, and lost and powerless we reach for something that gives us what we lack; that lights a way through the darkness and gives us the illusion of company. I could have reached for the bottle, I could have found the needle and the razor blade or I could have settled for the empty release that the back streets of Kings Cross provide to the lonely and dispossessed.

But my chosen narcotics were delivered digitally.

Command & Conquer, Civilisation, Lemmings and even Doom and Tomb Raider saved me. Here was something that the rest of my life lacked. They took the quivering wreck of a man that I had become and allowed me an illusion of control. Here, in the gameworld, I had power over my fate. In this space, I could influence the fall of nations and recovery from failure was only ever a quick-load away.

Holding dominion over miniature idiots. The perfect respite.

These games, and many others, gave me the support that I needed in my darkest hours. I leant on them, and learnt from them. They gave me the space that I needed, while the rest of my life was falling apart, to rebuild, to decide to change and, perhaps, to grow up.

It’s taken me years to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood, for me to learn to love my daughter, and I’m a very different man now than I was ten years ago. Life goes on, and new paths are opening all the time but I’m still learning and still growing. And videogames are still helping me cope when the weight of the world gets too heavy to shoulder any more.

ahchay, September 2004

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